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An unforgettable first novel, an author to shout about, a campaign to ensure that everyone knows this is the funniest, sharpest read of the year.

Consisting entirely of staff emails, e spends a fortnight in the company of Miller Shanks, an advertising agency that scales dizzying peaks of incompetence. Among the cast are a CEO with an MBA from the Joseph Stalin School of Management, a Creative Director who is a genius, if only in his own head, designers and copywriters driven by breasts, beer or Bach Flower Remedies, and secretaries who drip honey and spit blood.

The novel is a tapestry of insincerity, backstabbing and bare-arsed bitchiness: that is to say, everyday office politics. Oh yes, and there is some work to be done too – the quest for advertising’s Eldorado, the Coca-Cola account.

e is sleazy, scurrilous and scabrously funny. It also contains a first-class joke about the Pope and sound advice on the maintenance of industrial carpet tiles.

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Product description

Amazon Review

The idea of the first e-mail novel could have been a disaster but instead is a minor comic triumph thanks to Matt Beaumont's E. The novel of letters goes back to Richardson, of course, but things have moved on from Regency rape to the lethal office politics of an advertising agency. The beleaguered protagonists may appear to be concerned with pitching for the Coca-Cola account but their real problem is watching their backs: the knives are out and everyone from head honcho David Crutton downwards is well aware that their careers are on the line. Another part of Beaumont's lineage in this unputdownable novel is the This Life school of detailed interpersonal observation: no one character is allowed to assume centre stage; people screw, argue and discuss professional responsibility while the reader slowly makes his mind up about them from the information conveyed in the increasingly frantic e-mails.

Matt Beaumont, though, is primarily a sharp and witty observer of the social scene, with caustic humour that leaps out of his characters' electronic missives. And we're pitched headlong into the situation: it's impossible not to find ourselves riveted by Rachel, James, Harriet, Daniel and all the rest of Beaumont's at-the-edge characters as they strive to achieve a common goal and sink deeper and deeper in the waste matter. But did anybody ever send an e-mail like this one from Lorraine, a woman out to get her own way?:

Two days in London and I'm in advertising. I went to a temp agency last week and they got me into this place called Miller Shanks. They did those shite ads for Kimbelle--you know, the Artist Formerly Known as Ginger Spice bungee jumping, looking like someone shoved a high voltage cable up her arse. I'm working for the CEO (posh for managing director). One of the lads thinks he's on for a shag but he looks too much like Bart Simpson (overbite, spiky hair and slightly jaundiced). Mind you, after a few Stellas he starts looking like Brad Pitt, so who knows?

--Barry Forshaw

Review

Praise for e‘A brilliantly plotted comic novel about life in an advertising agency, narrated entirely through office emails. It gives me more sense that literature is alive and kicking than anything else I’ve read in these millennial 12 months.’ Humphrey Carpenter, Sunday Times Review of the Year

‘Lively, viciously funny and about as switched on as a novel can be’ Mirror

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I bought this as a paperback when it came out at the turn of the millennium. I loved it then and have enjoyed re-discovering it and realising how pertinent it still is today - we haven't learnt a thing in office email culture!It's very funny and you'll find yourself flicking back a few pages to understand why something is now funny that you can't work out why and then get he aha moment.

I'm on my second reading and second copy of E now. I lent my first copy to someone who laughed so much they forgot to return it. I laughed a lot both times. It's very hard not to. This is a VERY funny book and a delight to read it again. The characters are all simultaneously hideous and highly addictive. The book is made up solely of e-mails within, and out of, wannabe advertising stars Miller Shanks as they haplessly lurch towards a pitch to Coca Cola. They're still clinging to the old Eighties ideals of excess and ego, and the pattern of the e-mails is that you shamelessly crawl to those above you in the office hierarchy, and mercilessly bully everyone below you to stake-out your territory. Unrelenting self-promotion is the other prerequisite, as you'd expect from a bunch of Admen. The truth is that everyone is riven with hyper insecurity and insincerity and it's hilarious to witness them all imploding.

Absolutely hilarious.As an ad agency senior myself, I found this book impossible to put down, incredibly accurate and "educational". The synergies between the 2 - faced employees at MS, are written impeccably and provide a stark reality - check for anyone working in advertising.Can't wait to start reading e before Christmas!

I read E Squared before reading this novel, which strictly could be described as its predecessor; however I didn't find reading them in the "wrong" order to be detrimental. Some of the characters from E are in E Squared but there is sufficient background to be able to pick up the narrative as required without having to worry about any previous action.

The book is all email based, as is explained in other reviews. The whole action of the story is based around the email correspondence of various characters, mainly the characters based in an advertising agency pitching for some prestigious accounts, and trying not to make a mess of the accounts they already have. The people, if you have ever worked in a professional services firm, are horribly familiar - bitchy, nasty, two-faced, precious, petty, bullying, autocratic, self-serving in the main. The emails range from vitriolic (though ever so politely written in the correct office etiquette generally) to utter sucking up to the boss. Sigh ... sadly all too familiar from some of the places I've been (un)lucky enough to have worked in in previous lives.

E is hilarious - there were a lot of `laugh out loud' moments - for example, when one of the characters asked if it was all right if they came to a meeting in their Nirvana t-shirt, and the respondent said "Come as you are". If you get that, you'll find it as funny as I did.

The characters are so reminiscent of people that actually exist that it's rather like the fascination of the horrible, reading this book - you know it's all going to end up badly, but you can't look away.

Thoroughly enjoyable - light, undemanding reading, but the storyline is entertaining, the characters are all too clearly drawn, and the reader is keen to know what happens next.

95 reviews already as I'm writing this, 74 of which gave 'E' a 5-star rating... is there still need for more praise? Perhaps not, but I just couldn't resist. Until a few years ago - until 2007 to be precise - I worked in advertising myself (as an account, I'm not sure if I qualified as 'the sad git in accounts' mentioned on the backcover), and back in 2000 when I first read this book I had to laugh out loud because it was so very very recognizable, the only thing missing seemed your typical financial director: always keen on blaming other people when clients protest invoices but never having met a client face-to-face themselves. I vividly remember sharing the book with colleagues, and not a single one of them wasn't struck by the similarity with people we actually knew and had to work with every day. On the other side, I just as vividly remember the often mind-boggling lack of intelligence on the client side (think 'Fawlty Towers' in a marketing context and you'll come close), so one could easily write a similar book from that perspective I guess.

Anyway, that was almost a decade ago and recently (don't know exactly why) I took 'E' from my shelves again, opened it and was captivated once again from the very first page. In retrospect I found it perhaps more over the top than when I first read it, but just as funny, and what I failed to notice the first time struck me all the more now: this is really a very cleverly plotted novel! And as much as in epistolary novels dating back hundreds of years such as Dangerous Liaisons (Penguin Classics) the characters all come very much alive in their e-mails. If you want to know what life in advertising is like 'E' may not give you a trustworthy objective view (though it comes close), but it will definitely have you laughing out loud.

Most of us know what it's like to work in offices seething with political undercurrents. It's hilarious relief to be dipped into Millershanks.com, where the egomaniacal scheming and neurotic backbiting utterly destroy any dreams of success.

As much fun is the elegant audacity of the book's construction. Writing purely in narrative - entirely emails - Beaumont comically captures all the posturing and ranting unique to the medium. He thus cleverly satirises both electronic `communication' and working `relationships'.

PC it isn't - but when you put the book down, your own corporate life seems quite tame after all.